About ImageNet

Overview

Welcome to the ImageNet project! ImageNet is an ongoing research effort to provide researchers around the world an easily accessible image database. On this page, you will find some useful information about the database, the ImageNet community, and the background of this project. Please feel free to contact us if you have comments or questions. We'd love to hear from researchers on ideas to improve ImageNet.

What is ImageNet?

ImageNet is an image dataset organized according to the WordNet hierarchy. Each meaningful concept in WordNet, possibly described by multiple words or word phrases, is called a "synonym set" or "synset". There are more than 100,000 synsets in WordNet, majority of them are nouns (80,000+). In ImageNet, we aim to provide on average 1000 images to illustrate each synset. Images of each concept are quality-controlled and human-annotated. In its completion, we hope ImageNet will offer tens of millions of cleanly sorted images for most of the concepts in the WordNet hierarchy.

Why ImageNet?

The ImageNet project is inspired by a growing sentiment in the image and vision research field – the need for more data. Ever since the birth of the digital era and the availability of web-scale data exchanges, researchers in these fields have been working hard to design more and more sophisticated algorithms to index, retrieve, organize and annotate multimedia data. But good research needs good resource. To tackle these problem in large-scale (think of your growing personal collection of digital images, or videos, or a commercial web search engine’s database), it would be tremendously helpful to researchers if there exists a large-scale image database. This is the motivation for us to put together ImageNet. We hope it will become a useful resource to our research community, as well as anyone whose research and education would benefit from using a large image database.

Who uses ImageNet?

We envision ImageNet as a useful resource to researchers in the academic world, as well as educators around the world.

Does ImageNet own the images? Can I download the images?

No, ImageNet does not own the copyright of the images. ImageNet only provides thumbnails and URLs of images, in a way similar to what image search engines do. In other words, ImageNet compiles an accurate list of web images for each synset of WordNet. For researchers and educators who wish to use the images for non-commercial research and/or educational purposes, we can provide access through our site under certain conditions and terms. For details click here